Secret sharing techniques permit secure key management by dividing a secret key into a number of key components, which are then distributed to different people within a group. Thereafter, certain subsets of individuals within the group can combine their key components to recover the key. Secret sharing has proved to be very useful in many cryptographic systems and applications other than cryptographic key management, such as system access control and digital signatures. Secret sharing provides a tradeoff between secrecy and reliability, rather than between safety and convenience as with physical locks. Secret sharing schemes are ideally suited to applications in which a group of mutually suspicious individuals with conflicting interests must cooperate. For a more detailed discussion of secret sharing techniques, see, for example, B. Blakley et al., “Threshold Schemes With Disenrollment,” Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO '92, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 540-548 (1993); or A. Shamir, “How to Share a Secret,” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 24, No. 11, 612-613 (November 1979), each incorporated by reference herein.
With the increasing utilization of the Internet, the number of applications that can exploit secret sharing techniques has also increased, such as electric voting and broadcast systems where a minimum attendance is required. In some cases, the individual components of the larger secret key may be equally important. In other cases, however, some individual components of the larger secret may be more important than other components. Conventional secret sharing techniques, however, treat all of the individual components of the larger secret, as well as the holders of such components, in the same manner. A need therefore exists for an improved secret sharing technique that provides additional flexibility for managing the individual components of the larger secret. A further need exists for a secret sharing technique that provides hierarchical access to the individual components of the larger secret to thereby share the secret among different groups of people with different thresholds. Yet another need exists for a secret sharing technique that allows a weight or importance to be assigned to each individual component of the larger secret.